17 November 2013

Home server upgrade

Servers are a difficult thing.

After running into many maintenance headaches on my Ubuntu 9.10 install (unsupported for 2-1/2 years now) I bit the bullet Saturday and decided to upgrade to 10.04. With it, I'm once again able to get updates to installed software and, of course, get all the shiny new. My procrastination plan was to wait and create a completely new server, but that just wasn't happening.

Upgrade took under two hours and was very smooth. Issues afterwards were all database-related. My user privileges were in some way not compatible with either the new OS or the new MySQL, so my home page, blog, two MediaWikis, RadioWave, and ContentMetrics were all off-line for a while. Once reconfigured, my wikis became borked in different ways. The PHP5 upgrade required me to upgrade MediaWiki from 1.13.x to 1.21.x. Ahh, the cascading upgrade process! What did we do before the Web had all of our answers? I remember, and am grateful.

I'll probably be chasing down minor issues for the next week, but damn it feels good to get my house in order.